Unassailability

All the aberrant streaks of his arrogant personality – its reckless rationalism, its world-domineering phantasy and its sectarian fanaticism – joined in an unholy conspiracy to dislodge the Muslim Scripture from its firmly entrenched position as the epitome of historic authenticity and moral unassailability.

Likewise, Jeffrey Nealson, in a recent issue of College English, reinforces the unassailability of the postmodern view of “self” as not the stable center of knowledge about itself or the world, but as an unstable product created at the site where language, culture, history, and politics intersect.

What he meant is the kind of official unassailability we associate with royalty, a sense of being exempt from interruption and criticism rather than impervious to them. Intrusions on dignity, he said, struck him with all the force of lèse-majesté.